Yankees Mug Shots

Yankees Mug Shots

SEPTEMBER 16--While far from a revelation, we still salute The New York Times for today’s front-page story about the genetic predisposition of New York Yankees fans to commit felonies (or, at the very least, Class A misdemeanors).

While Times reporter Manny Fernandez focused on the commission of crimes by individuals wearing Yankees baseball caps (one such Brooklynite happened to be the subject of a story in these pages last week), many more suspects are collared wearing Bronx Bomber jerseys, t-shirts, sweatshirts, and other garments bearing the team’s name and/or distinctive logo.

As seen on the following pages, we’re presenting the mug shots of 60 Yankees devotees, a motley array of perps collared by a wide assortment of U.S. law enforcement agencies. These fans of the reigning World Series champions were busted for almost every crime codified in the country’s criminal statutes. Though, happily, none were popped for murder. Yet.

While the question of what elemental force drives Yankees fans to such criminality is best left to sociologists, the example set by George Steinbrenner, pictured at left, cannot be discounted. The Yankees owner, who died in July, was himself a felon, having been convicted of a Watergate-era conspiracy involving illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign. (10 pages)